Wednesday, February 17, 2010

reMail Acquired by Google

I'm thrilled to announce that Google has acquired reMail! I will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team.

Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004, and I'm thrilled to be coming back to a place with so many familiar faces. reMail's goal was reimagine mobile email, and I'm proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. Still, I feel like we've only seen the beginning of what's possible. Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information. If you have what it takes to make these changes happen, I encourage you to reach out and come join me.

You might be wondering what will happen with reMail's product. Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store. reMail is an application on your phone. If you already have reMail, it will continue to work. We'll even provide support for you until the end of March, and we've enabled all paid reMail features for you: You can activate these by clicking "Restore Purchases" inside the app. reMail downloads email directly from your email provider to your phone, and your personal information, passwords, and email are never sent to or stored on our servers.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the people that helped make reMail a success. Fabian Siegel, Einar Vollset, Sridhar Srinivasan, Paul Bohm, Marissa Coughlin, Erol Koc, Matt Ronge, and Stefano Barbato have all contributed to building a great product. Our investors saw the potential in improving mobile email and took a bet on reMail in the darkest days of the recession. I couldn't be more grateful to YCombinator: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Kate Courteau, and Trevor Blackwell all have provided invaluable guidance. Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh endured my slide deck on our multi-step plan for global email domination, and pointed out that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful. It worked.

This is great news for you and Google. See, Google is pretty hellbent on destroying the experience as much as possible on the iPhone and that is why they bought your company, so they can remove your app, and possibly incorporate it into the Droid phones.

This does seem a little odd. "I'm proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. [...] Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo" -- And so the first step towards improving the status quo is to remove an already-written application which many users found useful? I'm not upset about this in the way Mr seems to be, but I've read this article three times and I keep thinking that I must have missed a paragraph somewhere. Something that would say what the problem is with letting the already-existing app just continue to be available to anyone who might be interested in trying it.

(I don't use email on my iPod touch, so it doesn't make much difference to me. But the article does seem odd)

I'm sorry but can't help feeling it doesn't reflect well on either you or Google that you would ditch satisfied users of your software so readily.As a fan of both of your companies I have to say I feel rather disappointed.

Let us not forget the name "Gabor Cselle". This is the name that we need to look for before we buy future products. If this name is involved with the product then avoid it because it may not be around in the future.

I think simply discontinuing reMail like this is irresponsible action. Unsupported product and a product not evolving is a dead product. The product will continue to work does not mean anything. Look at what happens when iPhone OS 4.o is out.

I think you should refund our purchase, even though it cost only a few bucks. You made good money in the acquisition alrady.

Don't worry Sherman. We decided to take out of the closet an old #1 product line in the 80s 90s, and redevelop it for the new mobile and emerging small device market. The market slowly dead as online connectivity was more feasibility for end user. With AT&T getting its Mojo Back with mobile (charging users more), our products will fit right in again, offering to lower the cost of readin/writing mail with all the offline activity advantages these products gained in their time.

If the market continues with the device/providers charging a premium, just like the in the old dial up work, offline applications will be in high demand. In the past, when AT&T was the only phone company around, they charged a premium for being connective. This hugh market, which we were #1 in the commericial market, began to decline as the cost of connectivity declined with the AT&T break up, local toll free charges and flat rates. The Mobile market has helped AT&T (and its off-springs) to once again charge a premium, making the offline data connectivity more marketable. So Google Should not expect to be only company and you got companies with far more experience in this market to give them a run for their money.

About Me

Gabor Cselle
San Francisco, CA

I work at Google, where I'm a Partner at Area 120. Previously, I worked at Twitter on trends, the logged-out homepage, and on MoPub. Twitter acquired our startup Namo Media in June 2014. Before Namo, I was a Product Manager at Google working on Google Now, Android and Gmail. I started reMail, a mobile email startup which was acquired by Google in February 2010.

Before reMail, I was the VP Engineering at Xobni, where we invented a popular plugin for Outlook, and a Software Engineer at Google. I have an MS degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Views and opinions expressed here are mine and not those of my employer Google/Alphabet.